Non-Prophet

Online Share

What are the biggest sites on the net? Here is a quick look at time spent online, and where it gets spent. Coming in as most disturbing entry is easily #18! Eww...

Who is John Gault?

I just started part III of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand on audio book from audible.com. This puts me a good chunk past the half way point, and I'm chipping away at this anvil of a book at a pretty good clip. I find that the audio book is an awesome way to multitask, allowing me to take in a story while working around the house, while driving or while doing some laborious task at work like soldering 0.1uf surface mount bypass capacitors onto circuit boards.

Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rands 1,000+ magnum opus outlining her philosophy called objectivism. The major themes of the book have dealt with personal freedom, government regulation, the failings of communism and support of free markets. The work is controversial because of how it is critical of government social programs, but thus far the examples given are so over the top that they seem a bit ridiculous.

Additionally, the book has been a bit long winded in spots, hosting lengthy monologues that can seem to go on forever. This is the kind of book that I might have a hard time getting through if I wasn't keeping my hands busy at the same time. The long winded rambling rant style of Atlas Shrugged has thus far lent itself very well to the audio book format. Rand's writing is superb and very entertaining thus far in this work though, and I don't think that I'm going to lose interest before I've finished the 52 hours of audio in this beast. It is feeling like the book could have been half the length that is has been so far, but I'm finding myself very tolerant of long windedness while cruising around in my car.

Wikipedia:

The theme of Atlas Shrugged is the role of the mind in man's existence and, consequently, presentation of the morality of rational self-interest.[2]

The main conflict of the book occurs as the "individuals of the mind" go on strike, refusing to contribute their inventions, art, business leadership, scientific research, or new ideas of any kind to the rest of the world. Society, they believe, hampers them by interfering with their work and underpays them by confiscating the profits and dignity they have rightfully earned. The peaceful cohesiveness of the world requires those individuals whose productive work comes from mental effort. But feeling they have no alternative, they eventually start disappearing from the communities of "looters" and "moochers" who bleed them dry. The strikers believe that they are crucial to a society that exploits them, and the near-total collapse of civilization triggered by their strike shows them to be correct.

Dark Matter

Kurzweil's Singularity to Become Film

All around amazing guy and Non-Prophet guest blogger Ray Kurzweil is taking his best selling book to the big screen. This should prove to be pretty cool at Kurzweil is a fascinating character and the books subject matter should lend itself to an interesting visual presentation. I'll be keeping an eye out for this one.

Ray Kurzweil has plenty of titles already: inventor, author, futurist, techno-optimist, artificial intelligence expert. Now he's adding a Hollywood gloss to that list by writing, directing, producing and acting in his first feature film. He's adapting his latest book to make a movie titled The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About The Future.

The "technological singularity" is a concept that's enchanting to some, like Kurzweil, and terrifying to others. As a result of the exponential progress of technology, Kurzweil believes, we're racing towards a day when the power of the artificially intelligent machines we create will exceed human brainpower. Our computers will then carry on fashioning a new world -- with luck, they'll keep our best interests in mind.

Monkeys "Go on Strike" When They Sense Unfairness

Ah yes. Ego, selfish jealousy and peer envy isn't something unique to species as evolved as humans. Monkeys can equally get pissed off when they feel like they're being taken advantage of, or when they see favoritism handing something undeserved to the next monkey in line. So this means that workplace cattiness is most probably a deeply rooted archetype. Nice.

National Geographic:

In recent tests designed to assess monkeys' sense of fairness, a group of brown capuchin monkeys "went on strike" and refused to perform routine tasks when they saw others receiving greater rewards for the same tasks.

The more effort the primates used to earn a reward, the more upset they appeared to be at the inequity, according to scientists who conducted the research.

"In human terms it doesn't matter how hard you have to work for a million dollars," said lead researcher Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University in Atlanta.

"But there's a pretty low cutoff point on what you'll do for five."

Danger Mouse

The implications here are that wired behavior could potentially be removed from people as well. One might say that we are the way we are for a reason, but what if the rapidly changing world has some left over artifacts that are no longer useful? Would you like to have your fear of XXX removed?

A team of University of Tokyo researchers led by professors Hitoshi Sakano and Ko Kobayakawa have announced they have genetically engineered a mouse that does not fear cats, simply by controlling its sense of smell. By tweaking genes to disable certain functions of the olfactory bulb — the area of the brain that receives information about smells directly from olfactory receptors in the nose — the researchers were able to create a “fearless” mouse that does not try to flee when it smells cats, foxes and other predators.

In studying the genetically modified mouse, the researchers have concluded that the evasive behavior exhibited by mammals when they smell predators may be genetically hardwired into the olfactory bulb from birth, and not learned through experience as commonly believed.

(thanks n8)

Einstein Letter Gallery

This is cool. Check out these letters written by Albert Einstein.

here.

Thinking In Pictures

The world of autism is totally fascinating to me. Imagine having brain function that works in a manner that is fundamentally different from the way we think. Imagine not being able to contemplate or run over a scene and debate it back and forth in your head.

here:

As a person with autism, it is easy for me to understand how animals think because my thinking processes are like an animal's. Autism is a neurological disorder that some people are born with. Scientists who study autism believe that the disorder is cause d by immature development of certain brain circuits, and over development of other brain circuits. Autism is a complex disorder that ranges in severity from a mild form (such as mine), to a very serious handicap where the child never learns to talk. The m ovie Rain Man depicts a man with a fairly severe form of the disorder.

I have no language-based thoughts at all. My thoughts are in pictures, like videotapes in my mind. When I recall something from my memory, I see only pictures. I used to think that everybody thought this way until I started talking to people on how they t hought. I learned that there is a whole continuum of thinking styles, from totally visual thinkers like me, to the totally verbal thinkers. Artists, engineers, and good animal trainers are often highly visual thinkers, and accountants, bankers, and people who trade in the futures market tend to be highly verbal thinkers with few pictures in their minds.

Man Lives Normal Life With Super-Tiny Brain

He has an IQ of 75, making him entirely functional, although below average in brain power. The truly amazing thing here is that a brain this distorted and messed up still manages to get the job done. It is really pretty amazing when you think about it. There isn't a whole lot there.

French doctors are puzzling over the case of 44-year-old civil servant who has led a quite normal life — but with an extraordinarily tiny brain. In a case history published in Lancet, (Journal reference: The Lancet vol 370, page 262) doctors led by Lionel Feuillet (Hopital of Marseille) say he was admitted to hospital after suffering mild weakness in his left leg.

Scans by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that the man's cerebral cavities, called ventricles, had massively expanded. "The brain itself, meaning the grey matter and white matter, was completely crushed against the sides of the skull".

The images were most unusual.. the brain was virtually absent," he said. They were astonished to see "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles - usually tiny chambers that hold the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain (left pictures; normal brain on the right).

Spacetime

When you consider that not only do we each walk around in our own Cartesian space, but that we each also carries a clock that actually runs at different rates from moment to moment, the world of the solid begins to look a whole lot less solid. Nothing is solid. And some things are not precisely as they seem.

The Oracle:

In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single construct called the space-time continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space being three-dimensional and time playing the role of the fourth dimension. According to Euclidean space perception, the universe has three dimensions of space, and one dimension of time. By combining space and time into a single manifold, physicists have significantly simplified a large amount of physical theory, as well as described in a more uniform way the workings of the universe at both the supergalactic and subatomic levels.

...

The concept of spacetime combines space and time within a single coordinate system, typically with 4 dimensions: length, width, height, and time. Dimensions are components of a coordinate grid typically used to locate a point in space, or on the globe, such as by latitude, longitude and planet (Earth). However, with spacetime, the coordinate grid is used to locate "events" (rather than just points in space), so time is added as another dimension to the grid.

Formerly, from experiments at slow speeds, time was believed to be a constant, which progressed at a fixed rate; however, later high-speed experiments revealed that time slowed down at higher speeds (with such slowing called "time dilation"). Many experiments have confirmed the slowing from time dilation, such as atomic clocks onboard a Space Shuttle running slower than synchronized Earth-bound clocks. Since time varies, it is treated as a variable within the spacetime coordinate grid, and time is no longer assumed to be a constant, independent of the location in space.

Note that treating spacetime events with the 4 dimensions (including time) is the conventional view; however, other invented coordinate grids treat time as 3 additional dimensions, with length-time, width-time, and height-time, to accompany the 3 dimensions of space. When dimensions are understood as mere components of the grid system, rather than physical attributes of space, it is easier to understand the alternate dimensional views, such as: latitude, longitude, plus Greenwich Mean Time (3 dimensions), or city, state, postal code, country, and UTC time (5 dimensions). The various dimensions are chosen, depending on the coordinate grid used.

The term spacetime has taken on a generalized meaning with the advent of higher-dimensional theories. How many dimensions are needed to describe the universe is still an open question. Speculative theories such as string theory predict 10 or 26 dimensions (with M-theory predicting 11 dimensions; 10 spatial and 1 temporal), but the existence of more than four dimensions would only appear to make a difference at the subatomic level.